Almost every college playwright or sketch or improv comedian was sort of aware of Christopher Durang - even kids in high school. His short plays were so accessible to younger people and I think that was inspirational to me.

Sometimes surely truth is closer to imagination or to intelligence to love than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.

When it came to political power blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Anyone who said he wasn't afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn't shake but inside I was shaking.

I'll confess right here that I secretly wish I'd have drawn a strip about a little boy with a fake tiger going for adventures throughout the universe in spaceships of his imagination.

I hope that I'm sexy in a different kind of way than I think that a lot of girls are right now. I think a lot of girls in the public eye especially musical artists are just kind of objectified a little bit and wearing super-skimpy outfits and leaving nothing to the imagination.

The Chinese art world does not exist. In a society that restricts individual freedoms and violates human rights anything that calls itself creative or independent is a pretence. It is impossible for a totalitarian society to create anything with passion and imagination.

All the works of man have their origin in creative fantasy. What right have we then to depreciate imagination.

We are more often frightened than hurt and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.

You have to imagine it possible before you can see something. You can have the evidence right in front of you but if you can't imagine something that has never existed before it's impossible.

Think left and think right and think low and think high. Oh the thinks you can think up if only you try!

Humor can help you cope with the unbearable so that you can stay on the bright side of things until the bright side actually comes along.

If you've never felt that you quite got a hold of it you just feel that before you die you've got to try and get it right once. And hope that the experience you have makes up for the some of the diminishing energy.

We need to recognise that the whole edifice of our fifth estate of our journalism has been built on a foundation of newspaper journalism and that that foundation is crumbling. The management of the media companies will deny that the end is nigh. I hope they are right.

People are rapidly losing hope and trust. They believe their government has been captured by special interests and no longer cares about them and they are right.

There are no ideas in the Republican Party right now in the Congress. They're the party of no. They desperately need some intellectual leadership. And whatever you think of Newt Gingrich he can supply intellectual leadership. So I hope he does run.

I'm moving on. I should have made that clear when I made the announcement. I guess I wasn't clear. If people think you're leaving a show after all these years you might be retiring. So I understand where they're coming from but I should have impressed the fact that I hope I'm just moving on right now.

Hope is a flatterer but the most upright of all parasites for she frequents the poor man's hut as well as the palace of his superior.

I'm a vegetarian and very much active in regards to how I feel about animal rights and protecting animals and giving animals a voice. But at the same time I appreciate and respect other people's decisions to eat meat. The only thing that I hope is that people are educated that they're aware that they're living a conscious lifestyle.

If we are going to stay a great power and I hope and pray we will we need the truth. We need to know what is going right and we need to know what is going wrong. There is no greater time than now.

I hope I can help guys come out and say 'All right dude I got a manicure... and I liked it.'

People tend to overstate my resilience but of course I hope they're right.

You have to have hope. It's irresponsible to give false hope which I think a lot of playwrights are guilty of. But I also think it's irresponsible to simply be a nihilist which quite a lot of playwrights especially playwrights younger than me have become guilty of.

I hope we never get to the point that we put ourselves in Jesus' place. But when I read the New Testament basically we get three mandates: to love God to love each other and to take care of the least among us. And I think this is at least a step in the right direction.